The Spectator » Ancient and modern » The Spectatorhttp://www.spectator.co.uk
The oldest continuously published magazine in the English language.Tue, 03 Mar 2015 18:34:21 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.3What real debate looks likehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9451532/todays-tv-debates-are-pointless-heres-the-real-thing/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9451532/todays-tv-debates-are-pointless-heres-the-real-thing/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9451532Ancients would have been astonished that parties never debate against each other in open, public forum except on the telly before general elections — and even then they do their best… Read more

]]>Ancients would have been astonished that parties never debate against each other in open, public forum except on the telly before general elections — and even then they do their best to resist. The reason is that politicians understand ‘debate’ only in terms of internal parliamentary procedures where the outcomes are entirely predictable. The result is usually one long exercise in freedom of screech. Look at PMQs.

In democratic Athens, the subjects for debate were determined by a people’s Council of 500. These were appointed by lot, 50 from each of the ten tribes, from among the male citizens of Athens over 30. They served for one year, never more than twice (and not in succession). Each of the tribes was on 24-hour stand-by duty for 36 days of the year to receive all business; Council would turn this into proposals to go before the weekly Assembly (all male citizens over 18). There, every citizen had the right to speak (twice) from the platform.

The significant point here is that in Assembly the famous politicians — people like Themistocles, Pericles or Alcibiades — had no greater rights than anyone else. All they could do to win their case was to persuade the Assembly that they were right and everyone else wrong. And they did this week after week on matters of importance to them. To read accounts in Thucydides of these intelligent, incisive and superbly articulate debates, determined by a show of hands, is a strange experience.

The contrast with our system is striking; and to judge from the details that occasionally dribble out, the only real debates in which our politicians engage are not those held in parliament, but those held within their own parties, behind closed doors, where they fight like wild cats to control the agenda. As a Greek pointed out, politicians quarrel with one another even when they share the same objectives. Ask the two Eds. Having access to those would perhaps generate real public engagement: after all, finding out how and why decisions are reached is far more revelatory than the decisions themselves, let alone anything on the telly.

In his diaries of his conquest of Gaul (58–51 bc), he constantly acknowledges the power terror wielded. When it became clear, for example, that in 58 bc he would have to take on the powerful German king Ariovistus who had crossed the Rhine into Gaul, his ‘whole army was suddenly gripped by such a panic that their judgement and nerve was seriously undermined’. Caesar, naturally, rallied the troops and in the ensuing engagement drove Ariovistus’ army back across the Rhine with massive losses.

Ariovistus had been a ‘friend of Rome’. That is what Caesar did to ‘friends’ who threatened him.

In 55 bc, two other German tribes crossed the Rhine. Caesar, finding the Gauls encouraging them to roam further in Gallic territory, engaged them at once. The speed of his attack caused utter panic and confusion, and Caesar mowed down the lot, women and children too: 430,000 of them, he suggested. To press the point home, he then crossed the Rhine himself: ‘I could see the Germans were all too keen to come into Gaul, and I wanted to give them reasons to fear for their own safety…’.

Result? The terrified Germans, beaten without a fight, fled for safety deep into their heartlands.

On top of flogging enemy chieftains to death, cutting captives’ hands off, and enslaving a million or so, this was Caesar’s way: ruthless decision-making, devastating speed of assault. But knowing that Rome’s terror tactics could generate a ferocious reaction (as the British fighter Calgacus said to his troops), Caesar had other cards to play when needed — he was equally famous for his clementia. Enemies never quite knew where they were with him.

The initiative against Isis was lost as they established themselves against a useless Iraqi army. But they are not invincible, and have yet to be tested in major conflict. Caesar’s Gallic Wars would make instructive reading.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9446212/julius-caesar-could-teach-isis-a-thing-or-two/feed/41David Davis vs Cicerohttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9438052/ancient-and-modern-the-limits-of-the-law/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9438052/ancient-and-modern-the-limits-of-the-law/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9438052The MP David Davis has lamented that the British seem to prefer laws that protect their security rather than guard their liberty. But the first duty of the state is… Read more

]]>The MP David Davis has lamented that the British seem to prefer laws that protect their security rather than guard their liberty. But the first duty of the state is to protect its citizens. If it could not do that, argued Thomas Hobbes, citizens had the right to disobey.

The Latin for state is res publica, ‘the people’s property/business/affairs’, and the Roman statesman Cicero took the view that the res publica was best served by laws whose sole aim was the republic’s ‘security and common interests’ (salus atque utilitas rei publicae). The 17th-century thinkers Hobbes, Locke and Spinoza and 18th-century Americans such as the key republican ‘founding father’ John Adams eagerly took up Cicero’s formulation.

But what does salus actually mean? Hobbes used it to justify state control, Adams independence from British rule. But in the famous Roman formulation salus populi suprema lex esto (‘the security of the people will be the highest law’), the context makes it clear that salus refers to the soldiers’ absolute priority — the protection of citizens and state that only soldiers could provide in times of military crisis.

As for libertas, during the Roman republic that meant equality before the law and protection from abuse by officials; for the elite, it also meant freedom to compete for high office on equal terms (no dictators). Speech did not come into it — unless it threatened public order or state security.

Thanks to the internet and a global world, threats from free speech to the salus of our state are far more severe. They must therefore meet with a more severe response. Since we do not want a Hobbesian solution — people taking the law into their own hands because the state will not protect them — the question becomes: how far can the law protect us? Lawyers assent to the proposition fiat iustitia, ruat caelum: ‘let justice be done, though the heavens fall in’ (1602). But one needs life to enjoy liberty; and if the heavens do fall in because the law does not deliver security, where is the liberty (let alone justice) in that?

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9438052/ancient-and-modern-the-limits-of-the-law/feed/7Long before the Magna Cartahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9431212/the-magna-carta-was-hopelessly-behind-the-times/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9431212/the-magna-carta-was-hopelessly-behind-the-times/#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9431212Important as the Magna Carta (ad 1215) has been as a founding myth for everything we hold dear about law and liberty, it was already hopelessly behind the times. Greeks… Read more

]]>Important as the Magna Carta (ad 1215) has been as a founding myth for everything we hold dear about law and liberty, it was already hopelessly behind the times. Greeks and Romans had got there long before.

Our political system derives from monarchs advised by a private council: first, the Anglo-Saxon ‘Witan’, and from 1066 the Norman curia regis, ‘king’s court’, the origin of parliament in the 13th century. The Athenians had established, 1,700 years earlier, the principle that all law be made, and all office held in rotation, by private citizens (the demos), when they developed the world’s first and last democracy, with its ‘equality of speech’ (isêgoria) and equality before the law (isonomia). Greek passion for independence and contempt for monarchy are well exemplified by the advice which (according to Herodotus) the Spartan Demaratus offered the Persian king Xerxes during his invasion of Greece in 481 bc: ‘It is thanks to the power of the law that Greeks have protected themselves against despotism… so they are free but not in all respects: their despot is the law. They stand in secret awe of that far more than they do of you.’ Aristotle (4th century bc) theorised at length about different types of constitution, distinguishing the monarchos from the turannos by the extent to which they allowed citizens to be free agents and acted out of self-interest.

When kings ruled Rome (traditionally from 753–509 bc), they were advised by a council of elders, who transmuted into the senate when Rome threw out the kings and became a republic. Within 50 years the common people had their own assembly and a right to veto senate business, and a law code had been established dealing with community and individual relationships. In his On Laws (1st century bc), the statesman Cicero asserted the principle that the state, though invested with authority, should understand the limits of its power, and the citizens the extent of their obligations to obey it.

In the UK in 1918, all males (and females) finally got the vote. Inch by painful inch, we are getting there.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9431212/the-magna-carta-was-hopelessly-behind-the-times/feed/14Greek tragicomedyhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9425791/syriza-could-have-learned-from-aristophanes-instead-its-headed-for-greek-tragedy/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9425791/syriza-could-have-learned-from-aristophanes-instead-its-headed-for-greek-tragedy/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9425791The German chancellor Angela Merkel has expressed her desire for Greece to remain part of the European ‘story’. Since Greeks — together with the Romans and Jews — actually created that story… Read more

]]>The German chancellor Angela Merkel has expressed her desire for Greece to remain part of the European ‘story’. Since Greeks — together with the Romans and Jews — actually created that story over the past 2,500 years, it is hard to see how they could not.

With help from the Romans, they laid the foundations of western history, philosophy, politics, education, architecture and literature, this last including epic, tragedy, lyric, pastoral and, especially, comedy.

In facing up to Europe, Syriza has the potential to keep that comic tradition alive. Aristophanes’ comedies envisage the little man or woman heroically taking on the big boys and winning through against all the odds, celebrating victory with marriage, drinking and sex.

In the context of the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, Trygaeus flies up to heaven on a dung beetle to bring down Peace, but finds she is not there, being buried deep in a cave on earth. He triumphantly excavates her. Dicaeopolis, a small farmer, makes a personal peace with Sparta, drives off the warmongers and proceeds to enjoy the benefits. Lysistrata agrees a sex strike with the women of Sparta, cuts off the money supply and forces the men to make a treaty.

The problem is that the Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras actually wants to keep Greece in the EU — the very organisation that has destroyed its economy. What is heroic about that? He claims he is restoring Greek ‘dignity’. What? By returning Greeks to tyranny, on slightly less onerous terms? Where is the ancient Greek love of independence in that? He must tell the EU to get stuffed and take Greece out. Europe will be shaken to the core and the Greeks will be free again — and if Greece stands for anything, it is freedom. Come on, Tsipras, remember your ancient birthright. Set an example for us all.

Alas, Tsipras will yield to the tyrant; the rag-bag collection of lefties making up his party will, as ever, shatter in internecine conflict; and the chance for glory will be gone. Equally comic, but tragically so.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9425791/syriza-could-have-learned-from-aristophanes-instead-its-headed-for-greek-tragedy/feed/6Natasha Parry And Gary RaymondfeaturedSocrates and Charlie Hebdohttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9420512/socrates-aristophanes-and-charlie-hebdo/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9420512/socrates-aristophanes-and-charlie-hebdo/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9420512What would the ancients have made of Charlie Hebdo? The First Amendment tolerates the expression of opinions, however offensive, but not behaviour that can be construed as an outright threat.… Read more

]]>What would the ancients have made of Charlie Hebdo? The First Amendment tolerates the expression of opinions, however offensive, but not behaviour that can be construed as an outright threat. It is a distinction that Greeks and Romans might have applauded.

The comedies of Aristophanes (5th century bc) dealt with the issues of the day. They were characterised by language of Shakespearean inventiveness, covering the whole range of imaginable scatological, sexual and verbal abuse, aimed directly at named or easily recognisable individuals. Used in the street, such language would have met with a pretty instant, and probably violent, response. But, it seems, the conventions of public performance at the comic festival in honour of the god of theatre, Dionysus, made it permissible. Even the gods (including Dionysus) were lampooned (though never Athena).

But that does not mean that anything went. In 399 bc, Socrates was executed for ‘refusing to recognise the gods recognised by the state, and introducing other, new divinities [and] corrupting the young’. The state was at risk. We have only Socrates’ moving defence speech (the meaning of the Greek apologia), but the prosecution case was enough to persuade the jurors. Liberty and licence on stage were one thing; real life was different.

The Romans would have felt similarly. They were quite relaxed about worshipping whatever gods they came across, but they still insisted that the security of the state depended on regular ritual in honour of their own deities. For political reasons they made an uneasy exception of the Jews, but saw no reason to do so for Christians. They were a threat to state security. End of argument.

In the absence of conventions about satire, the ancients would have had no truck with Charlie Hebdo, which attacks the local god as keenly as alien ones, let alone with Islam, unless Muslims agreed to worship the local god as well. Today’s secular world, however, finds this all very difficult.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9420512/socrates-aristophanes-and-charlie-hebdo/feed/0Law, democracy and rapehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9415082/ched-evans-law-vs-people-power/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9415082/ched-evans-law-vs-people-power/#commentsThu, 15 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9415082‘This was the rule for men that Zeus established: whereas fish, beasts and birds eat each other, since there is no law among them, to men he gave law, which… Read more

]]>‘This was the rule for men that Zeus established: whereas fish, beasts and birds eat each other, since there is no law among them, to men he gave law, which is by far the best thing’ (the Greek farmer-poet Hesiod, 7th century bc). Given the hostile reaction to the convicted rapist Ched Evans’s desire to return to his job as a footballer after serving his sentence, one wonders whether the fish, beasts and birds might not be on to something.

The 4th century bc statesman and orator Demosthenes pursued Hesiod’s line of thought when he said, ‘If laws are abolished and each individual is given powers to do what he likes, not only does our communal organisation vanish but our very life would be in no way different from that of animals.’ That was what he feared. The Athenian ‘judiciary’ consisted of the very Athenians who both made the laws in the democratic Assembly and then as jurors in the courts passed judgement on defendants, without guidance from judges, barristers or clerks. That was real people-power, but it meant they could make it up as they went along, if they wanted to.

This relative insouciance about legal process emerges in a number of court cases, where it is clear that the speeches on both sides often seemed to be answering not the question ‘What wrong, if any, has been done, and by and to whom?’ but ‘What do we want to do about this person, whatever (s)he has or has not done?’

By Athenian standards, then, our system suffers from a serious democratic deficit that no Athenian would have accepted: we believe in an independent judiciary which respects the law, not public opinion. But as the Ched Evans case demonstrates, that deficit is made up when the law has had its say, and the twittocracy in all its self-righteous fury is unleashed. The result is that Evans, having committed a rape for which he was duly punished, is being yet further punished, as if we were living under an Athenian, not English, system. Well, we are a free country. So be it. One idly wonders what will happen if he wins his appeal.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9415082/ched-evans-law-vs-people-power/feed/0Oaths for MPshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9409452/what-mps-need-is-an-oath-with-consequences/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9409452/what-mps-need-is-an-oath-with-consequences/#commentsThu, 08 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9409452Before taking their seats in Parliament, all MPs must swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen. Mark Durkan, MP for Foyle in Northern Ireland, recently suggested that they should… Read more

]]>Before taking their seats in Parliament, all MPs must swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen. Mark Durkan, MP for Foyle in Northern Ireland, recently suggested that they should also swear an oath to do no wrong. In this election year, that could set a useful precedent.

Political orators in the Greek world talked of the good citizen as one who cared for the like-mindedness of all citizens and for his city’s interests — defending the fatherland, obeying the laws and authorities, and honouring the state’s cults — and young Athenian males swore to this effect when they reached the age of 18. The Roman emperor Augustus made all citizens swear an oath to be loyal to him and his descendants, having the same friends and enemies, reporting on any plots and being ready to take up arms on his behalf.

Oaths could also be sworn to guarantee personal business and legal transactions; and they were always sworn between enemies making peace treaties — neither side could trust the other an inch. But friends would never need to swear oaths, unless dodgy business was afoot.

To ensure the oath was kept, ancients sealed it in the name of the gods. The theory was that anyone who broke it would therefore be subject to divine as well as human retribution. Oaths frequently defined what would happen to the oath-breaker. In the case of Augustus’s oath, this encompassed ‘the destruction and total extinction of my body, soul, life, children, my entire family, and everything essential down to every successor and every descendant of mine, and may neither earth nor sea receive the bodies of my family and descendants nor bear fruit for them’.

That sounds a suitably positive note, which the Speaker would surely endorse. A minimum requirement might entail MPs swearing, in the name of ‘Democracy’ (which the Athenians made a god), to honour their election manifestos — or else.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9409452/what-mps-need-is-an-oath-with-consequences/feed/0Fifa and the Olympianshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9404622/an-ancient-olympic-tradition-that-fifa-would-love/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9404622/an-ancient-olympic-tradition-that-fifa-would-love/#commentsThu, 01 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9404622Those nice people at Fifa seem to be having a terrible time from the British press, which never stops accusing them of bribery and corruption. What on earth is our… Read more

]]>Those nice people at Fifa seem to be having a terrible time from the British press, which never stops accusing them of bribery and corruption. What on earth is our problem? Of course games are corrupt. In the ancient world, we now know they could be legally corrupt. Perfect!

The Greek comic poet Cratinus invented three goddesses of political bribery: Doro, St Give, Dexo, St Receive and Emblo, St Backhander. Courts described such ‘corruption’ in terms taken from the despised world of trade — ‘buying’, ‘selling’, ‘profit’ and so on. In the real world, however, it was more usually described as ‘giving’, ‘receiving’ and ‘persuading’. One Greek orator argued that personal advantage from bribery was fine as long as it brought tangible public benefits.

That culture transferred smoothly to games. At Olympia there were rows of bronze statues of Zeus (Zanes), paid for by, and featuring the names of, those found guilty of taking bribes to fix a contest or e.g. to ensure that if they were over age, they were still entered for junior competitions. Coaches were notorious for their involvement in this racket, setting deals up, negotiating terms and so on.

In one famous case, a boy won a wrestling match by promising the loser £50,000, but then refused to pay up because his opponent had actually tried to win — the unprincipled cheat. The dispute was not settled privately, so it was agreed to decide the matter on oath. The loser, ‘without blushing’, happily swore in public that the price had been agreed.

Even better, there has recently come to light the first ever papyrus to document a legal contract beween the reps of two boys for the outcome of a wrestling match, complete with bribe (the price of a donkey)!

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9404622/an-ancient-olympic-tradition-that-fifa-would-love/feed/0How the Romans taught Latinhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9395992/how-the-romans-taught-latin-n-m-gwynne-would-not-approve/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9395992/how-the-romans-taught-latin-n-m-gwynne-would-not-approve/#commentsThu, 11 Dec 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9395992Barely a week passes without someone complaining about the teaching of English or foreign languages, usually because it involves too much, or too little, grammar. The ancients also had to… Read more

]]>Barely a week passes without someone complaining about the teaching of English or foreign languages, usually because it involves too much, or too little, grammar. The ancients also had to face the problem. Clearly, non-Romans who wanted a career in Roman high society, the courts, civil administration or the army needed to learn Latin. So they did, and by the 2nd century AD, the Greek essayist Plutarch was able to say that almost all men used Latin. Certainly, as the Vindolanda tablets demonstrate, the Latin of the Germanic officer Cerealis was very respectable.

But Romans also admired Greek culture enormously, and Latin literature drank deeply at its well (the statesman Cicero could switch effortlessly between Latin and Greek). Trade too provided incentives for Romans to learn Greek; and as it was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, and there were huge numbers of Greek slaves in Rome as well as immigrants, more Greek was probably spoken in Rome than the local lingo.

So how did the ancients do it? As Professor Eleanor Dickey (University of Reading) has shown in her outstanding scholarly edition of The Colloquia (Cambridge), when it came to learning foreign languages, the ancients initially (it seems) finessed the grammar and began with jolly bilingual stories featuring scenes and conversations from everyday life.

Professor Dickey lists 80 surviving manuscripts designed to enable Greeks to learn Latin, and vice-versa. They consist of vocabulary lists (very big on food), grammars, and texts (these make up more than half the material, with Virgil and Cicero especially popular). These texts appear in two columns, one to three words wide, the Latin on the left, and the Greek — a word-for-word translation of the Latin — on the right.

Among these texts are the colloquia, bilingual conversational stories for beginners. They tell of schoolboys going to school, lawyers in court, trips to the baths and people borrowing money from a banker, summoning friends for lunch and visiting the sick. They are constructed in a series of easily-digested, phrase-book style utterances.

Here is one featuring a tremendous weed straight out of St Custard’s. Omitting the Greek, I quote the Latin and Professor Dickey’s English translation:

Fotherington-Thomas — for surely it is he — then leaves the bedroom with his pedagogue and nurse, greets his parents with a kiss and sets off for school. He greets the teacher, who kisses him and returns the greeting, takes his books (scrolls), writing tablets, styluses and ruler from his slave, rubs out the previous contents of the tablet, rules new lines, writes his work, and shows it to the teacher who corrects it and crosses it out. The teacher then orders him to read aloud. There is a squabble with a fellow pupil, the tinies in the class practise their Greek letters, and F-T gets down to his grammar, parsing words and declining nouns. He goes home for lunch (white bread, olives, dried figs, cheese, nuts, water), and back to school. I searched in vain for the Greek/Latin for ‘chiz’.

These conversations are full of interest. When slaves fail to make the bed up properly, the master refuses them permission to go out for the night and says they will be for it if he hears a single peep out of them. A man borrowing money at a bank asks what the rate of interest is — quibus usuris? The banker replies quibus vis — ‘Whatever you want’! Probably this was a polite convention: the man would not get his money if he wrote down the wrong rate. Likewise, the banker tells him to check that the coins he receives are not debased, and to ensure he repays the loan in equally good coin.

Two friends go the baths (towel, strigil, face-cloth, foot-cloth, oil, soap) and hand their clothes to the slave to guard against theft. They exercise with a ball and wrestle for a bit (one of them is reluctant — non scio si possum — because he has not done it for a long time). They pay the keeper and plunge in. Dried off, oiled and dressed, they buy goods at the bath-shop — chopped food, lupins and beans in vinegar — and go home.

When over 40 years ago the Cambridge School Classics Project produced a Latin course consisting of carefully graded stories, it was a controversial move. But as these marvellous colloquia show, nothing could be more achingly traditional, with a pedigree going back 2,000 years. So Professor Dickey will be publishing these colloquia, suitably adapted, as an elementary Latin course. Might as well have the real thing, after all.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9395992/how-the-romans-taught-latin-n-m-gwynne-would-not-approve/feed/7snfeaturedAristotle on David Mellorhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9389272/aristotle-had-david-mellors-number-andrew-mitchells-too/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9389272/aristotle-had-david-mellors-number-andrew-mitchells-too/#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 03:30:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9389272Andrew Mitchell and his ‘effing pleb’ of a policeman, David Mellor and his ‘stupid sweaty little shit of a taxi driver’ — Aristotle would have been delighted at how precisely… Read more

]]>Andrew Mitchell and his ‘effing pleb’ of a policeman, David Mellor and his ‘stupid sweaty little shit of a taxi driver’ — Aristotle would have been delighted at how precisely they matched his analysis of the angry man.

The emotions, said Aristotle, especially anger, alter one’s judgment, causing both distress and pleasure. For example, lowly policemen and taxi drivers would not normally have been anywhere on the radar of the two Ms. But feeling crossed by such little people, they changed their minds about them, distressed at their impertinence but relishing the prospect of revenge by putting them in their place. Aristotle quotes Achilles at this point, who in the Iliad (the epic of Achilles’ destructive wrath) acknowledged anger as ‘far sweeter than oozing honey, spreading in a man’s heart and expanding like smoke’.

Aristotle then defines anger as a response to someone belittling you, in three possible ways: by contempt, spite or humiliation. Now, no one actually belittled the dashing duo. They just felt their heroic status threatened, ‘since men think they are entitled to be treated with respect by those inferior in birth, power and virtue, and generally in whatever they themselves excel: so a rich man thinks himself superior to a poor man, an eloquent man to one unable to express himself, and a ruler to one who is ruled’. Spot on!

Aristotle finally identifies specific situations in which men are moved to anger. These are particularly relevant — when they feel belittled in front of those whom they wish to emulate (Mellor, who had his considerably more able wife with him), those they admire or by whom they want to be admired (Mellor), or those they respect or by whom they wish to be respected (Mitchell).

]]>After the Philae space-lab’s triumph, one can see why Education Secretary Nicky Morgan should have hymned the ‘Stem’ subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths). At the heart of our service industries, they solve physical problems from vacuum cleaners to Viagra and make life more agreeable for billions. Solve the problem of finite resources and pollution, and all should be peace and light.

But will it? In Phaedo — a conversation reported by Plato between Socrates and his friends on the day of Socrates’ execution (399 bc) — Socrates talks of his enthusiasm as a young man for speculation about how the world worked. But it gradually became clear to him that understanding the mechanics of the physical world had nothing to say about ‘how to do what we think is right’. It was through this train of thought that Socrates put man at the centre of a debate about nature, the understanding of right and wrong and the pursuit of happiness, all of which the ancients came to see as inseparable. As Petrarch said of a scholastic opponent in 1368, ‘he has much to say about animals, birds, and fishes … but what is the use of knowing [this] and not knowing, or spurning, the nature of man, to what end we are born, and whence and whither we pilgrimage?’

Ancient thinkers tried to solve the problem through philosophy, theologians through revealed scriptures. They have had limited success. But there aren’t any jobs and money in that, are there, Ms Morgan? It’s just dreary old ‘education’. What a waste of time. Oh, and by the way, as Plato saw in his Republic, the world needs a variety of skills. If everyone does Stem subjects, who will do the advertising, artwork, personnel and legal side, accounting, investing (etc.) that the service industries need? Yes, Ms Morgan?

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9383172/nicky-morgan-vs-socrates/feed/2Aristophanes on the Fake Sheikhhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9374742/aristophanes-on-mazher-mahmood/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9374742/aristophanes-on-mazher-mahmood/#commentsThu, 20 Nov 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9374742Undercover journalist Mazher Mahmood, otherwise known as the Fake Sheikh, has been accused of dodgy dealing in luring the innocent to commit ‘crimes’ which he has then exposed to the… Read more

]]>Undercover journalist Mazher Mahmood, otherwise known as the Fake Sheikh, has been accused of dodgy dealing in luring the innocent to commit ‘crimes’ which he has then exposed to the press. The Athenians knew all about his sort.

They called such people sukophantai (pl.), our ‘sycophants’, though the derivation of the word remains obscure, and it is not clear how it came to mean ‘toady’ in English. The sukophantês came into being as a result of legislation by the Athenian statesman Solon (c. 640–560 BC). Since there was no such thing as the police or a Crown Prosecution Service in the ancient world, it was important to find some way of bringing to book those who had harmed individual citizens. So Solon, arguing that ‘the best governed state was one in which those who were not wronged were as diligent in prosecuting criminals as those who had personally suffered’, ruled that for certain types of offence, ‘anyone who wanted to’ could bring a case to court.

This was where the sukophantês came in. Those cases offering financial rewards for a successful prosecution were his stock-in-trade; or he could blackmail people wishing to avoid prosecution, or accept money from those who would pay him to bring a case against a personal enemy. Becoming wise to this, Athenians penalised those who dropped cases midway and those who failed to gather a fifth of the jurors’ votes.

In Aristophanes’ comedy Wealth (388 BC), the sycophant finds himself impoverished because the blind god Wealth has his sight restored and can now see who deserves to be rich. He laments his ‘patriotic martyrdom’, claiming that, as ‘unofficial superintendent of all public and private affairs’, he was simply ‘seeking to help my beloved city to the utmost of my ability’. Just like that heroic Mr Mahmood, who claims to have acted in all our interests by bringing many people to ‘justice’.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9374742/aristophanes-on-mazher-mahmood/feed/0Demosthenes vs Russell Brandhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9367442/the-lesson-of-athens-to-make-people-care-about-politics-give-them-real-power/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9367442/the-lesson-of-athens-to-make-people-care-about-politics-give-them-real-power/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9367442Voters explain their apathy about politics on the grounds that the politicians do not understand them. No surprise there, an ancient Greek would say, since the electorate does not actually… Read more

]]>Voters explain their apathy about politics on the grounds that the politicians do not understand them. No surprise there, an ancient Greek would say, since the electorate does not actually do politics. It simply elects politicians who do, thereby cutting out the voters almost entirely.

But the contrast with 5th and 4th century bc Athens does not simply consist in the fact that all decisions, both political and legal, were made by the Athenian citizen body meeting every week in Assembly. As Pericles’ Funeral Speech (430 bc) famously demonstrates, what is so striking about Athens is that the nature of the world’s first (and last) genuine democracy and the importance of preserving it were the subject of constant public debate.

Take the prosecution that the 4th century bc Athenian statesman Demosthenes brought against one Meidias, for assaulting him during a play-festival in the theatre of Dionysus. Though no serious harm was done, Demosthenes explained why he had brought the case — because Meidias’ assault was a threat to the very essence of Athenian democracy and its commitment not only to justice but also to the freedom, equality and security of every citizen. To summarise: Meidias was filthy rich. So he thought he could get away with it, as if the law counted for nothing. But the law was all that stood between the arrogant rich and the threat they posed to every ordinary citizen. That bulwark would survive only if every citizen was an active participant in the democracy: for ‘the laws are powerful through you, and you through the laws’.

Nothing there about ‘inalienable rights’, only active citizenship. So who is making the case for our system? If no one, why not? Is it because, like the EU, it needs reform? And if so, how? (Forget the Lords: only Parliament counts.) Consider, for example, the Scots’ referendum. People were actually doing politics then, because they made the decision. Hence the huge turnout. Is there a hint there? After all, every politician applauded. Or was it just crocodile applause? Is it the politicians at fault, not the system?

]]>Explaining the death of a pilot testing a Virgin Galactic rocket-ship, Sir Richard Branson intoned: ‘I truly believe that humanity’s greatest achievements come out of the greatest pain.’ The ancients would have been appalled, both at the crass ignorance of the sentiment and its implication.

It is hard to see how papyrus, made out of marsh plants in Egypt since about 3,000 BC, resulted from ‘the greatest pain’. Yet, in combination with the presumably pain-free invention of the Greek alphabet, from which the Roman and our alphabet derive, this material was to drive literacy and a knowledge revolution across the Mediterranean. The technology took another dramatic leap forward when the codex, or book, was invented by the Romans in the 1st century BC, replacing the clumsy and inefficient scroll. One wonders how many lost their lives doing that.

To turn to the work of the mind, not many died when Euclid’s axiomatic method laid the secure foundation for later mathematics or Archimedes did work ranked with that of Newton, Gauss and Euler. Few fatalities were incurred when Aristotle invented biology and the rules of logic, Homer invented epic and Herodotus history. When, without a single casualty, the Roman poet Lucretius made Epicurus’ atomist theory of life the subject of his great poem On the Nature of the Universe, it would revolutionise our understanding of the world 1,700 years later. And all that from just the ancient world.

Further, Branson’s assertion that sending millionaires on holidays into suborbital space will be one of ‘humanity’s greatest achievements’ is grotesque enough; but the implication that ‘the greatest pain’ — i.e. the death of members of his workforce — is a price well worth paying in the cause of his saint-like devotion to the betterment of mankind suggests he is close to losing all sense of proportion. A Greek sentiment, surviving in Latin, might sum up his situation: quem Jupiter vult perdere, dementat prius — ‘whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he first drives mad’.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9361622/no-richard-branson-our-greatest-achievements-dont-come-from-our-greatest-pain/feed/0Sir Richard Branson addresses a crowd offeaturedWhy ostracism beats Ukiphttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9355812/forget-ukip-what-we-need-is-some-ostracisms/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9355812/forget-ukip-what-we-need-is-some-ostracisms/#commentsThu, 30 Oct 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9355812For all Nigel Farage’s appealing bluster, he is never going to be in a position to get us out of Europe or, indeed, achieve anything at all. He is, in… Read more

]]>For all Nigel Farage’s appealing bluster, he is never going to be in a position to get us out of Europe or, indeed, achieve anything at all. He is, in other words, pointless. The sole consequence of his emergence on to the political scene will be that the next election stands a good chance of producing an Italian-style hodge-podge: no winners at all. Ancient Greeks would have demanded an ostracism.

An ostracism was a way of getting rid of a political troublemaker in order to clear the decision-making air for the democratic Assembly of Athenian citizens. It was not a legal process, with prosecution and defence and verdict; nor was it a punishment, affecting the honour, status or property of the citizen ostracised. It was a decision taken by the citizenry itself, against which there was no appeal, for that citizen to go into exile for ten years.

Every year, the Assembly was asked it wanted to trigger one. If it did, it was held two months later (a useful cooling-off period for reflection and discussion, if passions at the time were high). Without any formal debate, let alone any list of nominees for the chop, citizens on the day scratched on an ostrakon (a piece of broken pottery) the name of their candidate and, as long as 6,000 ostraka were marked, the loser went into exile. Given that the measure was precautionary, he could be recalled before the ten years was up if the political situation was such that his stance was no longer a threat.

All, in fact, very civilised. The only problem was: what if the ‘wrong’ man was ostracised? It did happen, and would probably happen too if we had the system: no doubt the electorate would identify Clegg as even more pointless than Farage and ostracise him.

The fact is that, referendum or no, the only way we will ever leave Europe is if Europe boots us out (e.g. for refusing to join the euro). Get over it. Vote Farage in 2015, and the only result will be a political farrago.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9355812/forget-ukip-what-we-need-is-some-ostracisms/feed/12The Conservative Party Annual ConferencefeaturedThe Greeks and rapehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9349502/why-the-ancient-greeks-thought-adultery-was-worse-than-rape/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9349502/why-the-ancient-greeks-thought-adultery-was-worse-than-rape/#commentsThu, 23 Oct 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9349502A footballer serves his sentence for rape, insisting on his innocence. Debate rages whether he should play again. To us, rape is taken to be the most serious of sexual… Read more

]]>A footballer serves his sentence for rape, insisting on his innocence. Debate rages whether he should play again. To us, rape is taken to be the most serious of sexual crimes. But would it have happened had he committed adultery? Of course not.

Ancient Greeks would have been baffled. For them rape was the usual violent behaviour, a fact of life, and consent did not come into it. It was violence not against the will of a person but against the protector of that person, i.e. her father, legal guardian or husband. His ‘property’ had been damaged, so a charge of ‘violence’ was brought by her protector, and the offender typically punished with a fine assessed by the jury at the trial.

Adultery, however, was a quite different matter. The reason is that it had a direct effect on the family, the institution the Greeks valued more than any other. Various punishments were possible, but if the adulterer was caught in the act, the protector could kill him on the spot and, if charged with murder, could plead that he had acted lawfully; the wife was automatically divorced.

The reason for this draconian punishment — the term ‘draconian’, derived from the 7th C BC Athenian lawmaker Drakôn, is used literally in this case — was twofold. First, whereas rape was merely a physical assault, the sort of thing anyone could expect at any time, adultery was seduction, an attempt to subvert the loyalty of the woman to her husband, family and home. Secondly, since adultery was not likely to be a one-off but to involve the woman’s eager co-operation, it was more likely to produce children. That jeopardised the whole basis of Athenian society, since only legitimate children could be full citizens. Adultery threatened to debase that vital coinage.

The modern western reaction to these issues is far more humane, but there still lurk rumblings from the past about the eternal accessibility of women, the dominance of the male, and the inviolability of marriage.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9349502/why-the-ancient-greeks-thought-adultery-was-worse-than-rape/feed/17Hannibal vs the Islamic Statehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9342432/hannibal-and-alexander-the-great-vs-the-islamic-state/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9342432/hannibal-and-alexander-the-great-vs-the-islamic-state/#commentsThu, 16 Oct 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9342432Whatever the Islamic State hopes ultimately to achieve by its current onslaught on all and sundry in the Middle East, Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, would… Read more

]]>Whatever the Islamic State hopes ultimately to achieve by its current onslaught on all and sundry in the Middle East, Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, would certainly understand why it has been successful (so far); but Hannibal, who came within an ace of conquering Italy, might offer a word of warning.

In the ancient world, conquest of territory was the route to enrichment: other people’s resources became yours to use as you wished. By 358 BC Philip had trained up what would turn out to be an almost unbeatable army. Moving south from Macedon, he picked off Greek city-states one by one, until by 338 BC he had gained effective control over all of Greece. He then planned an assault on Persia, but was assassinated in 336 BC. Alexander fulfilled his father’s ambitions.

Philip’s success, however, was not simply down to his army, superb though it was; it was the fact that he knew that the ever-disunited, squabbling Greek cities would never combine against him. He could therefore take them out piecemeal, which he did. IS has made exactly the same calculation about the situation in Syria and Iraq. But where does it go from there?

Hannibal enjoyed spectacular successes against the Romans in his assault on Italy from 218 BC — at Cannae (216 BC) he took out both consular armies and controlled almost all Italy. But he still depended on winning over local Italians in order to succeed. He failed; and even worse, he was unable to maintain contact and supply-lines with his base in Carthage in North Africa. IS has no base anyway, and prefers genocide to winning over locals.

So, surrounded as it is by potential enemies, IS seems unlikely to have any long-term future. The interesting question is: what will the state that masterminds its defeat do in the region? As a Greek foresaw of the Rome-Carthage conflict, the victor would not sit on his laurels: and Rome certainly did not. So IS’s ultimate legacy may be to create a new super-power in the Middle East.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9342432/hannibal-and-alexander-the-great-vs-the-islamic-state/feed/16Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps exhibited 1812 by Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851featuredAristotle on Brooks Newmarkhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9335911/how-aristotle-would-have-judged-brooks-newmark/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9335911/how-aristotle-would-have-judged-brooks-newmark/#commentsThu, 09 Oct 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9335911News that the soon-to-be-ex-Tory MP Brooks Newmark has sent pictures of his genitals to a second (presumed female) contact has centred yawningly around ‘rights’, ‘exploitation’, ‘power’ and so on. Aristotle can… Read more

]]>News that the soon-to-be-ex-Tory MP Brooks Newmark has sent pictures of his genitals to a second (presumed female) contact has centred yawningly around ‘rights’, ‘exploitation’, ‘power’ and so on. Aristotle can take us back to basics.

The ancients did not do ‘rights’ anyway: they did the law. If there was no law against what you were doing, go ahead. But that did not mean that your action was therefore praiseworthy. How, then, should a man, especially one in the public eye, judge his actions? Aristotle suggested there were four main criteria: whether the actions in question were legal, advantageous, honourable and appropriately motivated.

That Newmark’s action was ‘legal’ is undeniable. That it was advantageous to him was conditional on the secrecy of the encounter he was hoping to set up. That might just possibly have suggested to him that his action was not honourable, let alone appropriately motivated. But clearly ‘honour’ and ‘appropriateness’ never crossed the mind of this minister for ‘civil society’.

In other words, he consciously chose a course of action that he knew to be wrong, as he made perfectly clear by resigning when he was found out. Here again, Aristotle has the last word. You can wish for whatever end you like, good or bad, but it is what you actually do about it that counts; and while ‘a worthless man wishes for anything that takes his fancy’, he says, an honourable man will wish for what is good, and choose appropriate means to achieve that end. But at every choice, Aristotle insists, ‘We have the power to act, or not to act, to say “yes” or “no”.’ As a result, he concludes, virtue and vice are up to us, while to absolve bad men of blame for wrongdoing automatically deprives good men of praise for virtue.

By talking the language of ‘rights’, ‘power’, ‘exploitation’ (etc.), one shifts the explanation of behaviour away from the individual to mysterious ‘forces’ within society. In fact, when it comes to choosing between right and wrong, the only force is oneself.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9335911/how-aristotle-would-have-judged-brooks-newmark/feed/1009featuredSalmond’s demagogueryhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9322572/ancient-modern-salmonds-demagoguery/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9322572/ancient-modern-salmonds-demagoguery/#commentsThu, 25 Sep 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9322572Alex Salmond spent two years campaigning for independence for Scotland on the grounds of ‘social justice’. Now, claiming that the vote was lost because of the ‘old’ (subtext: the rich), he… Read more

]]>Alex Salmond spent two years campaigning for independence for Scotland on the grounds of ‘social justice’. Now, claiming that the vote was lost because of the ‘old’ (subtext: the rich), he says he might declare independence anyway. His unprincipled demagoguery puts one in mind of Athenian society, as described by the ‘Old Oligarch’ (whoever he was).

The O.O. saw Athens as a society in which the poor lorded it over the rich. His central point was that, because the poor were ignorant, ill-disciplined and evil, while the wealthy cared for what was good and just, the interests of the poor were not served by allowing the rich to hold power.

So a radical democracy, giving the power over all political decisions to a majority of citizens, inevitably favoured the poor, there being far more of them than of the rich. In that way the poor ensured that they were not enslaved to the educated wealthy. For the wealthy would simply pass laws that punished wrongdoing, and ‘not allow lunatics to participate in politics or meet in assembly’. That, the O.O. argues, might look like good government, but the poor preferred bad government because it put them on top.

So, for example, the poor ensured the courts served their own interests rather than those of justice. They made the wealthy pay for festivals for them to enjoy, and triremes for them to get paid to row: for ‘the common people think that they deserve to get money for singing and running and dancing and sailing in the ships, so that they get more, and the rich become poorer’. Indeed, to put on the great tragic festival of the Dionysia alone involved the rich paying for the training of 1,165 citizens for months on end. And the O.O. had to admit the system worked: travesty that it was, it kept the poor in power.

When Salmond reckoned he would win, he thought democracy wonderful. Crushed, he has no time for it, let alone for the old (and rich) who crushed him, and he threatens to ignore the verdict. That’s ‘social justice’, Salmond-style.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9322572/ancient-modern-salmonds-demagoguery/feed/1BRITAIN-SCOTLAND-POLITICS-REFERENDUMfeaturedForewarned is forearmedhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9315712/forewarned-is-forearmed/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9315712/forewarned-is-forearmed/#commentsThu, 18 Sep 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9315712President Obama was assailed for saying that the USA had no strategy on combating Isis. Vegetius (late 4th century AD), the author of the only surviving Roman treatise on military science,… Read more

]]>President Obama was assailed for saying that the USA had no strategy on combating Isis. Vegetius (late 4th century AD), the author of the only surviving Roman treatise on military science, would have approved, since ‘no plans are better than those you carry out without the enemy’s knowledge in advance’. Indeed, he went so far as to argue that the reason why the Minotaur was depicted on legions’ standards was because ‘he was hidden away in the innermost and most secret labyrinth’.

As it is, Obama has now revealed his strategy, which is to train up and equip local armies to do the job for him. Vegetius would not have approved of that. As Roman armies found from the 4th century BC, allied tribes that they had trained up in Italy could give them a bloody nose when alliances broke up. Still, needs must; and as Vegetius began, ‘in every battle, victory is not a matter of numbers or simple bravery, but of skill and training’. That was how Romans conquered the world: ‘continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war’. No wonder the Latin for ‘army’ was exercitus, from a root giving us ‘exercise’.

Vegetius was very sound on leading a newly recruited army. Knowing that confidence and morale were the key to military success, he recommended that raw recruits be combined with grizzled veterans to go on easy missions. The secret was to watch out for moments when the enemy was not paying attention, when e.g. they were eating meals, sleeping, resting, unarmed, exhausted after a long march, busy plundering and so on. Again, since ‘the unknown is greatly exaggerated’ (Tacitus), one must accustom recruits to the sight of the enemy, their weapons and tactics: ‘for what is familiar is not frightening’. That said, Vegetius also knew that, since luck often decided a battle, ‘it is better to subdue an enemy by famine, raids and terror’.

Ronald Reagan was right: ‘We [must] fight for [freedom], protect it, defend it and then hand it on.’

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9315712/forewarned-is-forearmed/feed/1Boris Island and Pericles’ porthttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9308792/the-boris-island-of-ancient-athens/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9308792/the-boris-island-of-ancient-athens/#commentsThu, 11 Sep 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9308792During his lecture on Athens at the Legatum Institute (see p. 22), Boris Johnson placed great emphasis on Athens’ development of Piraeus harbour in the 5th century BC. Did he… Read more

]]>During his lecture on Athens at the Legatum Institute (see p. 22), Boris Johnson placed great emphasis on Athens’ development of Piraeus harbour in the 5th century BC. Did he have an analogy with a pet project in mind?
It was the statesman Themistocles who ‘had been the first to propose that the Athenians should take to the sea’, and in 493 BC began to turn Piraeus with its three harbours into a military facility, replacing the old harbour at Phalerum. With Persian attack from the sea in mind, he built dockyards, mooring sheds and fortifications.
This move had momentous political consequences for the poor. In 508 BC, Cleisthenes’ democratic reforms had handed power to decide political issues to the people’s Assembly. Since rowers, unlike hoplite fighters, did not need expensive armour, they came from the poorer classes — and they were now Athens’ main fighting force, giving them serious political clout.
Boris Island does not have such motivating forces. But in time Piraeus did develop superb commercial facilities so that ‘the products of the whole world flow into us… and we enjoy them just as naturally as we do our own’ (Pericles). All human life was there: statesmen, kings, tourists and even gods (!), merchants, ship-owners, bankers and accountants thronged the area alongside sailors, fishermen, porters and others looking to make a living or a deal.
One Thrasyllus even went down there every day holding a register, in the belief that he owned the ships and was set to make a meaty profit from them. His brother arrived and sent him off to the doctor. Cured, Thrasyllus commented he had never been happier than watching his ships come in.
For ships read ‘planes’: surely a rewarding way for Boris to pass his years of retirement.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9308792/the-boris-island-of-ancient-athens/feed/0Nicias vs Alex Salmondhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9303312/would-alex-salmond-give-up-his-job-to-a-heckler-it-happened-in-athens/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9303312/would-alex-salmond-give-up-his-job-to-a-heckler-it-happened-in-athens/#commentsThu, 04 Sep 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9303312Alex Salmond claims to be thrilled that so many people in Scotland are suddenly gripped by politics. The importance of the question before the Scots — the future of their… Read more

]]>Alex Salmond claims to be thrilled that so many people in Scotland are suddenly gripped by politics. The importance of the question before the Scots — the future of their 8.5 per cent of the United Kingdom — is only part of the reason. What really animates them is that the decision is in their hands, not Alex Salmond’s.

To see what happens when such genuine power-to-the-people is on display, consider the events of 425 BC. In their war against Sparta, the Athenians, masters of the sea, had trapped 420 Spartans on the island of Sphacteria. But it was proving difficult to get them off, and time was running out. In Assembly in Athens, the abrasive citizen Cleon (who had never held any military or other post) criticised the slowness of the operation, and turned his fire on Nicias, a senior general still in Athens, saying he (Cleon) could easily do it. Nicias told him to go ahead. Cleon agreed, thinking he did not mean it, but when he realised Nicias was serious, backtracked. The people shouted at him to put his money where his mouth was; even more so when Nicias resigned his position, handing it to Cleon. The people cheered Nicias on, and Cleon was forced to yield, adding he would complete the operation in 20 days. The people fell about: either Cleon would fail and be killed in the attempt, or succeed — win-win! The change was constitutionally validated, and the people voted to send him off.

That is what unashamed, fully engaged democratic power looks like. And, for the most part, it worked: the contrast between Athens’ extraordinary achievements as a real democracy (508–322 BC) and its later history is very telling.

Politicians regularly lament voter apathy, but if they were sincere, the Scottish (let alone ancient Greek) example would suggest that they should be keen to hand more big decisions to the public. In fact nothing appals them more. Ask George Osborne if he would resign and hand the job over to a heckler. Ask Alex.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9303312/would-alex-salmond-give-up-his-job-to-a-heckler-it-happened-in-athens/feed/0salofeaturedPleasure and purposehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9299162/horace-still-understands-happiness-better-than-the-lse/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9299162/horace-still-understands-happiness-better-than-the-lse/#commentsThu, 28 Aug 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9299162So here comes another book about how to be happy, written by Professor Dolan, an ‘internationally renowned expert’ at the LSE. The key evidently lies in ‘pleasure and purpose’, derived… Read more

]]>So here comes another book about how to be happy, written by Professor Dolan, an ‘internationally renowned expert’ at the LSE. The key evidently lies in ‘pleasure and purpose’, derived from your ‘daily felt experiences’, an analysis hymned in the introduction by a Nobel prize-winner as a ‘bold and original move’. Really?

Since Dolan asserts that happiness derives from your ‘felt experiences’ (or ‘paying attention to the things that make you happy’), he is simply saying that it is a state of mind. Very original. This old hat is a form of 4th century bc Stoicism, which asserted that happiness depended on what went on inside your head, because that was all that you could ultimately control. And the ‘pleasure’ principle is, of course, pure Epicurus, inventor of hedonism (341-270 bc).

To the objection that moral value appears not to play any part in the equation, Dolan asserts that ‘happiness is the arbiter of the rightness of what makes you happy’. Socrates has endless fun with this absurd claim in his dialogue Gorgias. Take, for instance, the man who thinks that happiness lies in holding power, but the man currently in power is a savage, lawless despot — the leader of Isis, say. To win the despot’s confidence and his own happiness, the man must turn himself into an equally lawless savage. He is now happy; therefore he is right. That at least is ‘bold’.

Further, Dolan affirms that altruism plays no part in his theory, because altruism is always ‘selfish’. But as Aristotle points out, indifference to others denies us the relationships of trust and co-operation implicit in the term ‘society’, to which mutuality is the key.

Finally, the whole formulation is half-witted. ‘Purpose’ (Dolan means ‘purposefulness’) is simply a means (one, surely, among many) to an end; ‘pleasure’ is the end. A far more intelligent and helpful key was formulated by the Roman poet Horace (65-8 bc) in a literary context: mixing utile — being useful, which adds the vital social element, with dulci — providing pleasure.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9299162/horace-still-understands-happiness-better-than-the-lse/feed/24Aesop on ageing gracefullyhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9292222/why-the-ancient-greeks-didnt-have-middle-aged-spread/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9292222/why-the-ancient-greeks-didnt-have-middle-aged-spread/#commentsThu, 21 Aug 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9292222A drug has been invented to halt what is known as middle-aged spread. But it would be so much better if there was no such thing as middle age in… Read more

]]>A drug has been invented to halt what is known as middle-aged spread. But it would be so much better if there was no such thing as middle age in the first place. After all, the Greeks had no such concept: why should we?

The people one feels sorry for here are the early Sumerian kings (modern Iraq). En Men Lu Anna apparently died at 43,200. Nor was it all rosy with the biblical patriarchs. Adam made it to 930 before Methuselah, grandfather of Noah, pipped him to the record at 969, dying seven days before the Great Flood. Only then did God thoughtfully cut the natural span to 120.

But for Greeks, childbirth, disease, diet and war meant that death rates peaked at birth, early childhood and the twenties. If one made it to the thirties, one might then expect another 15 to 20 years. Relatively few got beyond that: perhaps 5 per cent made it to 60, 1 per cent to 80. As a result, middle age seems to have been squeezed out entirely.

Pythagoras set the bar pretty high, dividing life up into four stages: 0–20 childhood; 20–40 adolescence; 40–60 youth; 60–80 old age. Some Athenians reckoned age by political responsibility, making you young up to 30 and old after 60. The Roman poet Horace thought more in terms of each age’s characteristics: dumb infancy; wild, uncontrollable youth; calm adulthood, people looking for money and friends; and finally querulous old age, when physical and mental decay set in. Again, no sign of middle age anywhere.

One of Aesop’s fables, however, does hint at the notion. A man whose hair was black flecked with grey had two lovers, one old, the other young. The old one wanted him to look old as well, so she plucked out his black hairs, while the young one wanted him to look full of youthful zest and so plucked out his grey hairs. Result: he became completely bald.

So why no middle-age spread? One factor may be that the ancients did not eat as much as we do. If so, it is instructive that overeating is the compulsion this new drug is designed to suppress.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9292222/why-the-ancient-greeks-didnt-have-middle-aged-spread/feed/2Demosthenes on Johnson and Salmondhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9286752/demosthenes-lessons-in-ambition-for-boris-johnson/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9286752/demosthenes-lessons-in-ambition-for-boris-johnson/#commentsThu, 14 Aug 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9286752The ancient Greek word for ‘ambition’ was philotimia: ‘love of high esteem in others’ eyes’. Both Boris and Alex Salmond are consumed by this desire for what Greeks saw as… Read more

]]>The ancient Greek word for ‘ambition’ was philotimia: ‘love of high esteem in others’ eyes’. Both Boris and Alex Salmond are consumed by this desire for what Greeks saw as a virtue.

The 4th-century bc statesman Demosthenes instructed a young man as follows: ‘Consider that your aim in life should be to become foremost of all, and that it is more to your advantage to be seen to aim at that eminence than to appear outstanding in ordinary company.’ The required reputation, however, did not derive from working for self-advantage but from willingness to sacrifice time, profit, health and life in the community’s interests. This, apparently, is Boris’s problem. He would do well to follow anonymous ancient advice: ‘Manage your affairs so that you are in a position of power, then lay off when you have a fair share, so that you may be seen to work for justice, not out of weakness, but from a sense of what is right.’

As for Salmond, since Greeks tended to judge people by their ability to compete successfully, philotimia regularly shaded into philonikia, ‘love of winning’. But this was a two-edged sword: the honourable desire to win could easily become arrogance, aggression or plain recklessness. This is Salmond’s problem. The clearer it becomes that he is going to lose, the more stridently irrational he becomes. Only a ‘Sod off Scotland’ letter signed by English celebs can now persuade Scottish waverers to vote ‘Yes’.

But Greeks also saw two big, external stumbling-blocks to ambition, both equally unpredictable. One was Fortune (Greek tukhê); the other was kairos, or making your move at the right time. It was this that tripped up Salmond. It could trip up Boris too, who (it seems) would admire the ancient school riddle ‘What makes good out of evil? Boldness. Force.’

Boris’s hero Pericles got it right, we are told, because he ‘knew what needed to be done’. Salmond clearly did not. Beyond sweeping all before him, does Boris?

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9286752/demosthenes-lessons-in-ambition-for-boris-johnson/feed/0Bread, circuses and Hamashttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9281931/bread-circuses-and-hamas/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9281931/bread-circuses-and-hamas/#commentsThu, 07 Aug 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9281931There must be some reason why Hamas seems to remain quite unfazed by Israel’s merciless slaughter of its people. Perhaps it is all part of a grand strategy. The point… Read more

]]>There must be some reason why Hamas seems to remain quite unfazed by Israel’s merciless slaughter of its people. Perhaps it is all part of a grand strategy.

The point about Greek democracy is that its purpose was to enable internal disputes to be settled peaceably, by argument and not recourse to arms, and for the most part that is what happened. The Roman republic was a res publica — the people’s property/business — while Senatus Populusque Romanus was displayed on army insignia and inscriptions all over the empire: the Senatus and the Populus were in it together. Even if this was slightly economical with the truth, Roman emperors knew that if the populus was unhappy, there was trouble ahead. The public servant Cornelius Fronto (c. ad 95–166) pointed out that the emperor Trajan was aware that the people were controlled principally by two things: free grain and shows (‘bread and circuses’, as Juvenal put it): general popularity was politically as important as effective policy.

However palsied western ‘democracy’ is compared with its ancient Greek equivalent, or even republican Rome, at least our governments understand that their sole raison d’être is to serve us, the people, and that if we do not like what they are doing, we can say so and peacefully get rid of them. The same is also true of Israel.

Nothing could be further from Hamas’s thoughts. For example, they proclaim the ‘right’ to resist. Since the price is 1,800 dead, mostly civilians, at the hands of a ruthless enemy, it sounds more like a right to be killed. Whose interests does that ‘right’ serve? Last week Israeli newspapers reported — for what it’s worth — that some Gazans protesting against the current war were simply shot in cold blood. No wonder people vote for Hamas. They know what will happen if they do not. Palestinians, in other words, are there to serve Hamas, not Hamas the Palestinians. It is not just Israel that is imprisoning this unhappy people.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9281931/bread-circuses-and-hamas/feed/28PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-GAZAfeaturedHadrian on the limits of powerhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9276421/hadrians-advice-for-a-new-defence-secretary/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9276421/hadrians-advice-for-a-new-defence-secretary/#commentsThu, 31 Jul 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9276421Michael Fallon, the new Defence Secretary, is a classicist by training. What lessons, if any, might he take from his study of the ancient world, especially in relation to military… Read more

]]>Michael Fallon, the new Defence Secretary, is a classicist by training. What lessons, if any, might he take from his study of the ancient world, especially in relation to military adventures in far-off places?

Hadrian offered the key insight on the problem when he became emperor in ad 117 and immediately abandoned some Roman provinces in the East: ‘Since we cannot control them, we must give them their freedom.’

Ancient Greeks are an interesting test case. While the city-states were free during the 5th and 4th centuries bc, they were constantly at each other’s throats, almost completely incapable of working together in each other’s interests. Athens itself was at war three years out of four over that period. Only from 338 bc, when mighty Macedon in the north under Philip II and his son Alexander the Great, imposed full military control did any sort of peace begin to prevail there, essential for the success of Macedon’s plans to take on Persia.

In 215 bc, Philip V of Macedon decided to side with Hannibal against the Romans. At that time, the Romans could send only occasional armies into Greece to slap Philip down. But when Hannibal was defeated in 202 bc, Rome decided to sort out the Greeks. It took them 50 years to work out that it was either total control or perpetual warfare. Total control was the result, bringing with it (for the most part) a Roman peace for hundreds of years.

But that was then, and that was Rome, and that was empire. We do not do empires today, however, and all our recent in-and-out forays have done is to reinforce that Roman truth: without total control, we get nowhere. So forget it. Hadrian-like, Mr Fallon must give them their freedom — Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine — to sort out their own problems, and concentrate on what he can and must control, predominantly the security of the UK. After all, he is Secretary of State for Defence, not Attack, and in today’s world, attack is not the best form of defence.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9276421/hadrians-advice-for-a-new-defence-secretary/feed/4Emperor HadrianfeaturedPlutarch on the iPhonehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9270291/plutarch-on-smartphone-addiction/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9270291/plutarch-on-smartphone-addiction/#commentsThu, 24 Jul 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9270291Adults, we are told, as much as children, become gibbering wrecks if deprived of their mobiles or iPhones for more than 15 seconds. The 2nd-century ad essayist Plutarch foresaw the… Read more

]]>Adults, we are told, as much as children, become gibbering wrecks if deprived of their mobiles or iPhones for more than 15 seconds. The 2nd-century ad essayist Plutarch foresaw the problem.

In his essay ‘On being a busybody’, Plutarch takes a very strict line on man’s desire to be up to date on every last piece of news and gossip, especially what is ‘hot and fresh’ and, most important of all, scandalous. Joyful occasions — weddings and such like — are of no interest. Country life is even worse, ‘since they find the peace and quiet unendurable’. It is ‘adulteries, seductions, family quarrels, lawsuits’ that a man wants, or if forced to be in the country, information about whether his neighbour’s cattle have died, or his wine oxidised. It is only a good haul of disasters and difficulties that will satisfy a man, enabling him to rejoice at other people’s misfortunes (Greeks too had a word for Schadenfreude).

As a result, says Plutarch, people receiving communications are so desperate to read them that ‘they go so far as to bite through the fastenings with their teeth if their hands are too slow’; and he contrasts the behaviour of one Arulenus Rusticus, who received a letter while listening to one of Plutarch’s lectures, but refused to open it till the lecture had finished and the crowds dispersed: ‘Everyone admired the dignity of the man.’

It is here that Plutarch draws an important contrast with our own world. While man revels in other people’s disasters, he says, no one has any desire for details of his own life and troubles to be spread abroad. Here he draws a splendid parallel with men’s hatred of customs officers, who dig around in one’s personal baggage, searching for concealed goods.

One can only guess at what Plutarch would have said about today’s iPhone-maddened generation, who, however desperate they are to receive gossip and scandal about other people’s lives, are just as keen to spread the same abroad, in words and pictures, about their own.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9270291/plutarch-on-smartphone-addiction/feed/8arlfeaturedThe rumour millhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9264351/ancient-modern-the-rumour-mill/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9264351/ancient-modern-the-rumour-mill/#commentsThu, 17 Jul 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9264351Geoffrey Dickens’s ancient dossier of (alleged) paedophiles in high places cannot be found among the 138 miles of government files, and rumour immediately takes wing. The ancients knew all about… Read more

]]>Geoffrey Dickens’s ancient dossier of (alleged) paedophiles in high places cannot be found among the 138 miles of government files, and rumour immediately takes wing. The ancients knew all about rumour: phêmê in Greek, fama in Latin, both words relating to ‘speech’.

In 415 bc, the Athenians sent an expedition to Sicily, and Syracuse was rife with rumours about it. In the Assembly, one speaker said it was all nonsense, stirred up by agitators wishing to create fear and thus gain power. It was a reasonable assumption: in 411 bc a revolution occurred in Athens as a result of rumour. Rumour has not lost its power as a modern political weapon either. Ancient grain-traders were also suspect: we hear of the charge that they spread rumours of storms and shipwreck designed to raise prices. Today’s stock markets are not exactly immune to the problem.

Greeks adopted two main criteria by which to evaluate such rumours. First, had the speaker himself been present at the event he was reporting, or had he just heard it from someone else? ‘Eyes are surer witnesses than ears,’ opined the philosopher Heraclitus; the Greek ‘know’ (oida) comes from same root as ‘see’ (eid-). It was common for a city to send its own men to witness for themselves what a messenger had reported.

Second, the credibility of the speakers: who knew them well enough to be able to vouchsafe for them, especially if they were messengers from outside the city-state? In particular, a man of high status was seen as more trustworthy than anyone of low status, especially if poor: that made him likely to lie for gain. So motive too had to be taken into account. It might be political or mercantile, as above, but it could be driven by a desire for a reward, or by treachery. Philip of Macedon said he could take any city by driving into it a donkey laden with gold.

What, then, can we say of the witness-value, credibility and motives of today’s rumour-mongers? Not to mention journalists?

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9264351/ancient-modern-the-rumour-mill/feed/0rumfeaturedThe Ancient way of deathhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9258541/assisted-dying-ancient-religion-was-all-for-it/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9258541/assisted-dying-ancient-religion-was-all-for-it/#commentsThu, 10 Jul 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9258541There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the major differences between e.g. Christians and pagans was that Christians… Read more

]]>There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the major differences between e.g. Christians and pagans was that Christians were renowned for welcoming, indeed rejoicing at, death. Pagans found this incomprehensible.

Not that pagans feared the afterlife. Although, in the absence of sacred texts, there were no received views on the matter, Greeks reckoned that if the gods were displeased with you, they would demonstrate it in this life rather than the next.

Initiates into the Eleusinian Mysteries were promised a prosperous afterlife, but Diogenes the cynic retorted: ‘Do you mean that Pataikion the thief will enjoy a better afterlife than [the great Theban general] Epaminondas, simply because he has been initiated?’

The point about the ancients is that death was certainly not welcome, because it was only in life that you made your mark. So Agilea in her epitaph urges her husband Oppius not to fear Lethe: ‘for it is foolish constantly to fear death and so throw away the joys of life’.

But when death beckoned, pagans wanted to remain in control. Dependency was for slaves and no-hopers, and the way one died — your choice of death — revealed the true stature of the person.

For Pliny the younger, suicide was among life’s greatest gifts, especially for those who were suffering. But such a death was not just for philosophically-minded aristocrats. The gladiator who, rather than face death in the ring, suffocated himself by thrusting down his throat the sponge with which he wiped his bottom was hailed for showing the utmost contempt for death.

NFFNSNC is commonly found on tombstones: ‘I was not, I was, I am not, I don’t care’ (Latin homework: reconstruct the original). That proclaimed, in pagan terms, a victory over death, as Christians also did. In both cases, it was a matter of staying on top.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9258541/assisted-dying-ancient-religion-was-all-for-it/feed/2galfeaturedBrussels vs Spartahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9252431/brussels-will-treat-britain-as-macedonia-treated-sparta/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9252431/brussels-will-treat-britain-as-macedonia-treated-sparta/#commentsThu, 03 Jul 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9252431The EU is a federation of states (Latin foedus, ‘treaty’, from the same root as fides, ‘trust, good faith’). But for how long can such a federation endure a recalcitrant… Read more

]]>The EU is a federation of states (Latin foedus, ‘treaty’, from the same root as fides, ‘trust, good faith’). But for how long can such a federation endure a recalcitrant member? At some stage the crunch will come, as it came for Sparta.

In 338 bc Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, completed his conquest of the Greek city-states (poleis) and formed them — for the first time ever — into a political federation. All poleis sent representatives to the Council meetings, but executive power was invested in Philip, and when he was assassinated in 336 bc, in Alexander, it was Macedon that called the shots, and that was the end of it. Its purpose was to keep the poleis weak, and foreshadowed the end of that autonomy which had been such a spur to the classical Greek achievement.

Enraged that Philip had deprived it of its border territories, Sparta refused to join this League. But Philip did nothing, calculating that Sparta could be safely left to stew in its own juice. In 331 bc, however, with Alexander rampaging across Persia, and local Macedonian reserves depleted, Sparta declared for ‘liberty’ and started reclaiming its lost territories. But not for long: in 330 bc the Macedonian general Antipater added League members and mercenaries to his army, and smashed the Spartans at Megalopolis. There was no more trouble from them. The Greeks clearly preferred life under Macedon to that under Sparta.

And EU members clearly prefer life under Juncker to interference from Britain. Wisely. For Britain, having refused the euro, is (like Sparta) a de facto outsider. So those trapped in the euro are not about to risk the wrath of the Junckers by supporting it. Further, the EU (like Macedon) holds all the cards, and at some time will play them: join the euro and you are in; refuse and you are out.

This is why Juncker, a key player in the invention of the euro, has been appointed President of the Commission — to prepare for the end-game.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9252431/brussels-will-treat-britain-as-macedonia-treated-sparta/feed/4Fishing with Plutarchhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9247301/fishing-with-plutarch/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9247301/fishing-with-plutarch/#commentsThu, 26 Jun 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9247301Dr Culum Brown of Macquarie University, Australia, has been doing some research on fish, and concludes that they are intelligent, live in social communities (etc) and generally display ‘behavioural and… Read more

]]>Dr Culum Brown of Macquarie University, Australia, has been doing some research on fish, and concludes that they are intelligent, live in social communities (etc) and generally display ‘behavioural and cognitive sophistication’. Dr Brown’s research would seem to have consisted of reading the 2nd Century AD essayist Plutarch.

In a treatise on the cleverness of animals, Plutarch stages a debate between the pro-animal and pro-fish lobby. Aristotimus, for the animal lobby, states that all living creatures have many human qualities. They demonstrate capacity for purpose, planning for the future, memory, perception, emotion, care for their young, gratitude, courage, sociability, continence, self-control and bigheartedness. He proceeds to prove this with reference to animals.

Phaedimus, for the fish lobby, argues that, since fish have no contact with humans, they cannot learn their behaviour from them. It must be innate. Their superiority is shown in a number of ways. They deliberately make themselves extremely difficult to capture; the sea bass actually throws off the hook by swinging its mouth from side to side to widen the wound. If a parrotfish swallows a hook, others show collective solidity and nibble it away. Society-loving tunnies are geometers: they form themselves into a cubic shape to eat and school together. Companionship is shown by the crocodile, which makes friends with the plover, allowing it to clean his teeth, and by the pilot fish, which leads whales away from shallows.

Phaedimus saves the best for last: the dolphin, ‘the only creature that loves man for his own sake… a relationship sought by the best philosophers, a friendship for no advantage’. He tells the story of a close friendship between boy and a dolphin until one day, during a storm, the boy fell off the creature’s back and was drowned. The dolphin picked up the body and threw it and himself on to the shore, where it, too, died, ‘thinking it right to share a death for which it thought itself responsible’.

Dr Brown concludes that fish should be included in our ‘moral circle’. Plutarch might well have agreed.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9247301/fishing-with-plutarch/feed/0Apollodorus on tax avoidancehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9237661/how-ancient-athens-beat-tax-avoidance/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9237661/how-ancient-athens-beat-tax-avoidance/#commentsThu, 19 Jun 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9237661The taxman will soon be ordering those planning dodgy tax avoidance schemes to declare them beforehand and pay the full tax on them up front. Only if HMRC finally decides… Read more

]]>The taxman will soon be ordering those planning dodgy tax avoidance schemes to declare them beforehand and pay the full tax on them up front. Only if HMRC finally decides the scheme is legal will the tax rebate be allowed. This is a very Greek principle, which could help with the problem of bankers’ bonuses.

The 4th century bc Athenian tax system was very progressive: only the richest paid any at all. In times of war, those with a certain value of declared property were liable for an emergency tax (eisphora), levied at 1 or 2 per cent. These wealthy Athenians — numbered in the thousands — were grouped into ‘tax partnerships’, and the state assessed what each partnership had to contribute.

As one might imagine, it was not easy to get the money out of them, especially since a number of reliefs against paying the tax was allowed. So the state devised a duty called proeisphora — ‘prepayment of the eisphora’ — which it imposed on the richest 300 Athenians. These would, of course, already be in a tax partnership, and the state decreed that the three richest in each partnership should pay up front what the whole partnership owed, claiming the money back from the other partners as best they could.

This caused some grief. The Athenian bank owner Apollodorus reminisced in a case brought after the event: ‘I never did recover the funds I had advanced because I was serving on a trireme, and when I got back I found that others had taken the funds of those with money and those left had nothing.’

But why not apply the system to bankers’ bonuses? The (say) three directors with the biggest bonuses have to pay up front the full tax owed by themselves and all the other directors, and then recover it. They can sort out legitimate claims for rebates between themselves and HMRC. But would they then equalise the bonuses so that no one got more than anyone else? No chance. That would threaten the pecking order and their hallowed self-importance.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9237661/how-ancient-athens-beat-tax-avoidance/feed/0The true gods of footballhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9229641/the-true-gods-of-football-hint-they-dont-work-for-fifa/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9229641/the-true-gods-of-football-hint-they-dont-work-for-fifa/#commentsThu, 12 Jun 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9229641The World Cup has started, and the gods of football will be in their heaven for a whole month. Not the players, of course: the spectators. Ancient gods, wielding absolute… Read more

]]>The World Cup has started, and the gods of football will be in their heaven for a whole month. Not the players, of course: the spectators.

Ancient gods, wielding absolute power, expected to have that power acknowledged. This was usually done by their adherents carrying out specific rituals at the right time and the right place. Do that, and the gods would smile favourably upon them, offering them personal benefits and even immortal glory in the eyes of the world. Fail, and that would be an affront, an insult to the gods’ dignity: their wrath would be unconditional.

So when, in the course of the Trojan war, Paris, seducer of Helen and cause of the war, was defeated in single combat by Helen’s husband Menelaus, the sex-goddess Aphrodite saved Paris from certain death, removed him from the battlefield and instructed Helen to make love to him. The by now disillusioned Helen told her to get lost: let Aphrodite marry Paris for all she cared. Aphrodite’s reply was chilling: do as you are told, or ‘I shall hate you as much as I now love you.’ The terrified Helen obeyed. Note that it was not just Helen who was on the line here: so too was Aphrodite. A god who commanded no respect or obedience was no god at all.

On this model it is clear who holds the power in the football stadium. The players may feel themselves to be gods, but they are in fact nothing but performing artisans, carrying out a ritual — defeating opponents. Do that, and the spectators will be pleased and celebrate their names down the generations. Failure, however, is a personal insult to every spectator’s sense of self-worth, an abuse of their judgment and support: how dare these ungrateful underlings refuse to come up with the right offering — a win? So the players and their priests (managers and directors) will deserve the impending onslaught of the divine wrath.

The fact that the players earn in a few days what most spectators earn in a year is neither here nor there. Gods have no interest in personal circumstances: what they require is obedience — and results.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9229641/the-true-gods-of-football-hint-they-dont-work-for-fifa/feed/0Caesar and Faragehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9225411/what-julius-caesar-would-have-done-about-nigel-farage/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9225411/what-julius-caesar-would-have-done-about-nigel-farage/#commentsThu, 05 Jun 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9225411Our politicians are desperately keen to turn the toast of the people, Nigel Farage, into toast himself. But is that wise? Time to consider the career of the Roman general… Read more

]]>Our politicians are desperately keen to turn the toast of the people, Nigel Farage, into toast himself. But is that wise? Time to consider the career of the Roman general Marius (157–86 BC).

Noble families — i.e. those who had held high office — dominated Roman politics. Marius did not come from a noble family, but it was wealthy, and it did have good connections, which Marius later improved by marrying an aunt of Julius Caesar. Thanks largely to his considerable military prowess, he worked his way up the slippery pole, and made his mark in 107 BC when he became consul on a people’s programme, and six times subsequently.

First, he made it clear that he was no toff. The historian Sallust gives him a cracking speech on the subject: ‘Compare me, the outsider, with these high and mighty ones. What they have learned out of books I have learned on the battlefield … It is for you to judge whether words or deeds are more to the point …The privilege they claim on the strength of other people’s merits they will not allow me in right of my own merits, just because I am a newcomer to the nobility of office. Yet surely it is better to have ennobled oneself than to have disgraced a nobility that one has inherited…’, and so on.

Second, a life in the army was a pretty good one, but the poor had always been debarred because they could not afford the kit. Marius not only started to recruit among them, providing the kit too, but he also kept them in arms, offering them a ‘pension’ of money and land after 16 years’ service. He therefore began the process by which soldiering would eventually become a full-time career.

Marius was no populist revolutionary. He was a people’s hero, and the establishment knew what they were doing when they embraced him. Today’s establishment must find a way of embracing Farage. Butter him up e.g. with a job negotiating immigrant numbers, vel sim. That’s what you do with toast.

]]>After 685 tightly argued pages, the ‘superstar’ economist Thomas Piketty unfolds his master-plan for closing the gap between the rich and poor: you take money away from the rich. Novel. Ancient Greeks realised you had to try a little harder.

The culture of benefaction was deeply rooted in Greek society, even more so when the Romans made Greece a province in the 2nd century BC and removed their direct power of taxation. The quid pro quo lay in the prospect of eternal honour for the donors. The services which the wealthy provided for the city included paying for baths, gymnasia and food supply. Where harbour facilities and commercial districts needed renewal, they would stump up. As for festivals and games, they would provide animals for sacrifice, prizes for competitions and banquets to celebrate the winners, with stars of the acting and musical worlds to entertain the crowds.

Here is Mendora, from the unknown Greek city of Sillyon. She was one of a group of ten rich citizens who met any shortfall in the collection of the city’s tax liabilities. She set up a foundation for poor children. She distributed cash in commemoration of her and her children’s service in public office: recipients ranged from the members of the town council at the top to ex-slaves and outsiders who had settled in the city at the bottom.

The theory behind this was that wealth was a matter of luck. In the absence of industry and big business, it tended to be inherited, usually within a family rich in land and rental income. So aristocrats were under pressure to show they were worth their inheritance by what they did for their city. Further, their reputation was on the line in the quality of the services they provided. They could not be seen to have subsidised e.g. a colonnaded street that promptly fell down. Get it right, however, and statues and honorific inscriptions would celebrate them. Many survive to this day.

Piketty has another equally radical recommendation to close the gap: increasing the minimum wage. Such brilliance.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9218581/how-the-ancient-greeks-did-wealth-taxes/feed/0Plato at the Jobcentrehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9212121/how-plato-and-aristotle-would-have-tackled-unemployment/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9212121/how-plato-and-aristotle-would-have-tackled-unemployment/#commentsThu, 22 May 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9212121Labour is up in arms because many of the new jobs currently being created are among the self-employed. This seems to them to be cheating. Quite the reverse, ancients would… Read more

]]>Labour is up in arms because many of the new jobs currently being created are among the self-employed. This seems to them to be cheating. Quite the reverse, ancients would have said.

Ancient thinkers knew all about the needs of the poor and were worried about their capacity to cause trouble (as they saw it) by revolution. So in a world where everyone lived off the land (the wealthy by renting it out), Plato thought there should be a law that everyone should have a basic minimum of land to live off, and no one should own property more than five times the size of the smallest allotment; any excess should be surrendered ‘to the city and to the gods’, presumably for redistribution as necessary.

Since Aristotle argued that the way to perpetuate prosperity was to distribute funds so as to give the poor the means of standing on their own two feet, he would presumably have agreed; but he disapproved of free handouts, because when the poor got them they simply wanted the same again, maintaining their destitution.

That was the point of both Plato’s and Aristotle’s thinking: to make people independent and therefore self-reliant. This meant not working for someone else (i.e. in a job), but only for oneself. However humble a person’s means, however lowly their origin, they could hold their heads up if they could run their own lives and not be beholden to other people.

Here was the crucial distinction between slave and free: the slave had no capacity to determine what his life should be like. He lived at others’ beck and call. But the free man, however poor, at least could choose to take whatever path he liked, consonant with his means: he was in some sense in control. Therein lay the route to self-respect and the capacity, as one ancient writer put it, to ‘think big’.

The virtues of the welfare state and the job market are many, but ancients would be contemptuous of a culture that deprived people of self-respect by keeping them dependent. They would have seen that as the equivalent of keeping them in slavery.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9212121/how-plato-and-aristotle-would-have-tackled-unemployment/feed/4Unemployment Figures Set To Rise Further In UKfeaturedXenophon on immigrationhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9206601/xenophon-on-immigration/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9206601/xenophon-on-immigration/#commentsThu, 15 May 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9206601Nearly half of Britain’s billionaires are foreigners, and government hopes many more will now come in on the government ‘start business — get passport’ scheme. Someone has obviously been reading… Read more

]]>Nearly half of Britain’s billionaires are foreigners, and government hopes many more will now come in on the government ‘start business — get passport’ scheme. Someone has obviously been reading Xenophon.

In the 350s BC Athens was in serious financial trouble. In his Poroi (‘Revenues’), Xenophon, a soldier and essayist, sketched out a plan to restore Athens’ fortunes. The big target was foreign businessmen, or ‘metics’ as the Greeks called them.

‘Metic’ derives from metoikos, literally someone who had ‘changed residence’, i.e. a Greek or non-Greek who was not Athenian. To live in Athens they had to have a citizen sponsor, be registered and pay a monthly tax. They were liable for military service, and could not own land or take any political role. They were there to work. Since Athens was a flourishing international city, there was money to be made from being part of it. It was trading that Xenophon had in mind.

Xenophon advocated doing away with sponsors and military obligations, opening up abandoned houses and sites in the city for ‘those worthy of it’ to live in and renovate, and establishing a Minister for Metics, with rewards for those who introduced the most. There should be special processes for speeding up trade disputes, and front seats at theatres and state banquets for top traders. A state capital fund should be set up to construct hostels for shipowners and visitors, trading stations, and houses and shops in Piraeus harbour. Foreign contributors to the fund (‘kings, tyrants, Persian satraps’) should be encouraged, their names registered as state benefactors. All this would see ‘imports, exports, transactions, sales, rents and excise duties’ soaring. And how about a state-owned merchant fleet for hire, as with war-ships? The result would be a wealth-producing meticocracy.

All very sound, though Ukip will doubtless moan that letting in foreign billionaires on the ‘start business – get passport’ scheme will simply nick jobs from hardworking Brits who would love a job as a billionaire.

In 431 bc the so-called ‘Peloponnesian war’ broke out between Athens and Sparta. In 427 bc, pro-Spartan oligarchs attempted to drive pro-Athenian democrats out of Corcyra (Corfu), as a result of which civil war spread rapidly from city to city. It was described with horror by the contemporary historian Thucydides, who imagined war as ‘a schoolmaster in brutality’, with both sides taking lessons from precedents already set to go to far greater extremes of destructiveness.

So men of violence won automatic credibility, and evaluation of actions consequently changed: what in normal circumstances would be called ‘bare-faced insanity’ became ‘staunch manliness’, ‘far-sighted caution’ became ‘a nice way of describing cowardice’, ‘moderation’ became ‘a pretext for gutlessness’ and ‘ability to see all sides of a question’ become ‘total unfitness for action’. ‘Bravery’ became associated with ‘violent reaction’, and ‘deliberation to avoid mistakes’ a ‘simple reason for doing nothing’. Fanaticism was the mark of the real man; his opponent a man to be suspected.

Revenge was more important even than self-preservation, while pacts were made merely to overcome temporary difficulties. Neither justice nor the interests of the people prevented men doing anything to win power by any means, and those who relied on policy rather than brute force were easily destroyed. Conscience was ignored: more attention was given to the man who could justify outrages attractively. Those who remained neutral fell victims to both sides.

From the IRA to Syria and now Ukraine — as Thucydides concluded: ‘so it will always be, while human nature remains the same’.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9202311/ukraine-vs-sparta/feed/1spartafeaturedBoris’s Periclean optimismhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9196221/ancient-and-modern-what-boris-and-pericles-have-in-common/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9196221/ancient-and-modern-what-boris-and-pericles-have-in-common/#commentsThu, 01 May 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9196221What is Boris’s great secret? Does it lie in the bust of the Athenian statesman Pericles (c. 495–429 bc) that he keeps in the Mayor’s office in London? The key… Read more

]]>What is Boris’s great secret? Does it lie in the bust of the Athenian statesman Pericles (c. 495–429 bc) that he keeps in the Mayor’s office in London?

The key can be found, perhaps, in Pericles’ passionate commitment to the idea of Athens as a ‘living lesson for Greece’. This was the central message of his famous Funeral Speech (430 bc) — not so much the heroism of the dead as the uniqueness of the city for which they had died and the contrast with its bitter rival, the conservative, inward-looking, military-obsessed Sparta.

Athens was a model to others, Pericles affirmed, a democracy governed in the interests of the many, not the few. Advancement in public life depended on merit; poverty did not stand in a man’s way. Tolerance in private dealings did not result in lawlessness. Further, Athens was an open city, attracting to it the produce of the world, with a relaxed life style that did not compromise resolve in battle. ‘We cultivate refinement without extravagance, and love of the intellect without going soft’. Wealth was a gateway for action, not merely for show. Far from being a stumbling-block to action, discussion and thought were indispensable preliminaries to it.

‘I doubt if the world can produce a man who, where he has only himself to depend on, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility, as the Athenian … So when you come to understand Athens’ greatness, reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty and a keen feeling for honour in action that men were enabled to win all this.’ And so on.

Most politicians regard us the people as liabilities. Pericles regarded them as Athens’ greatest asset, and played them like a violin, even when they turned against him. So with Boris. The more he says he believes in us, the more we are prepared to believe in him. That unquenchable Periclean optimism is the key.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9196221/ancient-and-modern-what-boris-and-pericles-have-in-common/feed/0A war for ‘human rights’http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9190421/ancient-and-modern-a-war-for-human-rights/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9190421/ancient-and-modern-a-war-for-human-rights/#commentsThu, 24 Apr 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9190421What a splendidly liberal leader Mr Putin has turned out to be, desiring nothing other for his fellow Russians than their human right to decide their own fate. How the… Read more

]]>What a splendidly liberal leader Mr Putin has turned out to be, desiring nothing other for his fellow Russians than their human right to decide their own fate. How the Romans would have applauded!

In 215 bc, while Rome was desperately trying to keep Hannibal at bay in Italy, Philip the fifth, king of the powerful northern Greek state of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s territory), decided to ally himself to Carthage. He had in mind putting himself about on the big stage, among the Greek leagues to the south, and north into the Balkans (where Rome was beginning to have interests); and after some success, in 205 bc his gaze turned east, across the Aegean towards Asia Minor.

But in 202 bc Rome finally defeated Hannibal and, far from being exhausted by their efforts, decided to sort Philip out. They warned him not to make war on Greek states, but he ignored them. In 197 bc, Flamininus led the Roman legions to victory over Philip’s Macedonian phalanxes in Thessaly, and a year later, at the Isthmian games in Corinth, he announced Rome’s settlement: Greece was to be restored to freedom, ‘without garrisons, without taxes, to live as it wished under its ancestral laws’. At which ‘a shout of joy arose, so incredibly loud that it reached the sea… and ravens which chanced to be flying overhead fell dead into the stadium’.

In the event, the reverse was the case. ‘Freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ became slogans that could be used both as an excuse for war and extending their empire (‘this people’s freedom is threatened and needs protection’) and as a means of maintaining the status quo in the shape of a stable eastern frontier. Freedom, in other words, became conditional on submission to Roman control, and if push came to shove, the mighty Roman army ensured that the Greeks did not fail to understand it. The result was maximum control with minimum boots on the ground.

Which is precisely the game that Mr Putin is playing in the Ukraine. What a useful tool ‘human rights’ are for justifying imperial expansion.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9190421/ancient-and-modern-a-war-for-human-rights/feed/0How we could hound officialshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9185871/mps-should-be-grateful-not-to-be-in-ancient-athens/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9185871/mps-should-be-grateful-not-to-be-in-ancient-athens/#commentsWed, 16 Apr 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9185871If the continuing rows over the expenses and lifestyles of certain MPs cast all of them in a bad light, it is a mystery why decent members do not take… Read more

]]>If the continuing rows over the expenses and lifestyles of certain MPs cast all of them in a bad light, it is a mystery why decent members do not take action to hasten the exit of their more shameless colleagues. If they do not, then the press will continue to hound them — but not half as hard as ancient Greeks hounded their officials, and not just officials either.

Plato’s ideal republic was ruled by ideal guardians, but as he admitted, man’s nature ensured he would have to settle for second best: decree and law. Even critics of Athenian radical democracy, where the people (male citizens over 18) in Assembly were sovereign, agreed that the system worked remarkably well because of the accountability to which both the Assembly and the courts ensured officials and citizens were subject.

First, all officials, whether appointed by election or lot, had effectively to hand over their property and civic freedom to the state. Then they underwent dokimasia — a scrutiny of basic civic requirements, such as treatment of parents, payment of taxes, fulfilment of military obligations and production of legitimate children. Any citizen could at this stage lodge an objection.

Every five weeks during his year of office, the official would be subject to a performance audit. Any vote of no confidence by the Assembly would result in the official standing down until cleared. At the same Assembly, any citizen too could be accused of conduct prejudicial to the state’s interest, e.g. treason, bribery and so on. Quite right: a citizen who persuaded the sovereign Assembly to take a disastrous course of action needed to be punished for it.

Finally, at the end of his term of office, an official had to present his records for a full audit of his conduct by public accountants. Finances, decision-making and results would be scrutinised and, again, any citizen could lodge a complaint. Only when fully cleared could an official honourably lay down office, reassume control of his property (etc) and take up normal civilian life.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9185871/mps-should-be-grateful-not-to-be-in-ancient-athens/feed/1Socrates on Maria Millerhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9180991/socrates-on-maria-miller/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9180991/socrates-on-maria-miller/#commentsThu, 10 Apr 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9180991Our former culture secretary, Maria Miller, is still apparently baffled at the fuss created by her fighting to the last to prevent her expenses being examined. It was a mere… Read more

]]>Our former culture secretary, Maria Miller, is still apparently baffled at the fuss created by her fighting to the last to prevent her expenses being examined. It was a mere ‘legalistic’ transgression; that’s what MPs do. So that’s OK, then.

Socrates once discussed with the young Euthydemus the question of going into politics. Euthydemus’ assumptions about what it entailed were all too simple, which led Socrates into discussing the importance of examining oneself.

‘Isn’t it obvious,’ said Socrates, ‘that people are successful, when they know themselves, and failures, when they do not? Those who know themselves know what suits them best, because they can distinguish between what they can and what they cannot do. By doing what they know about, they meet their own needs and achieve their ends; while by steering clear of things they don’t understand, they avoid failure and mistakes. This also enables them to make sound judgements about others, and through their relations with them to provide themselves with what is good and guard against what is bad.

‘But those who do not know themselves, and are deceived in their estimate of what they can and cannot do, are in the same boat when it comes to dealing with everyone and everything else. They understand neither what they need, nor what they are doing, nor the people they are dealing with … This ruins their reputation and makes them laughing-stocks, despised and dishonoured.’

‘Yes, yes, I know all that,’ says Euthydemus, ‘but how do I begin the process of self-examination?’ ‘Well,’ says Socrates, ‘you must be able to distinguish right from wrong.’ ‘Of course I can do that,’ snorts the young man. ‘Oh, really?’ replies Socrates…

To most people, Mrs Miller looked exactly like Euthydemus, but she and the Commons ‘standards’ (irony intended) committee, who reduced a £45,800 payback to £5,800, doubtless saw themselves as Socrates. If so, then as Cicero said in a similar context, ‘from now on the Roman people will know the quality of judgement to expect from Roman senators.’

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9180991/socrates-on-maria-miller/feed/0David Cameron, oraclehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9174511/is-david-cameron-trying-to-imitate-the-delphic-oracle/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9174511/is-david-cameron-trying-to-imitate-the-delphic-oracle/#commentsThu, 03 Apr 2014 03:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9174511Nigel Farage rather missed a trick in his debate over the EU with Nick Clegg. The Prime Minister has promised us an ‘In/Out’ referendum on the EU in 2017, if… Read more

]]>Nigel Farage rather missed a trick in his debate over the EU with Nick Clegg. The Prime Minister has promised us an ‘In/Out’ referendum on the EU in 2017, if the Tories are returned to power. But there is a condition: the referendum will be held (his words) ‘When we have negotiated a new settlement…’ (23 January 2013). The problem is that word ‘When’. Does he really mean ‘If’? As it stands, Cameron’s ‘promise’ has all the hallmarks of the Delphic Oracle.

Take poor old Croesus, king of Lydia. The historian Herodotus tells us that he asked the oracle what would happen if he fought the Persian king Cyrus. ‘You will destroy a great empire,’ it replied. Croesus was overjoyed, but cannily followed it up by asking if his reign would be a long one. ‘When a mule is king of Persia, run for your life,’ came the answer. That seemed to settle the issue.

Croesus took on Cyrus and was duly defeated. Made captive, he sent to the oracle to ask what on earth it was up to. The oracle replied that to the first prophecy he should have enquired ‘Which empire?’ and on the second should have reflected that Cyrus was the mule in question, being the son of parents of different races — a noble Mede mother, but a base-born Persian father. Herodotus goes on: ‘When the reply was reported to Croesus, he admitted that the god was innocent and he had only himself to blame.’ As the sixth-century BC philosopher Heraclitus said of the god of the oracle, ‘he neither speaks nor hides: he uses signs’ — and we have to make sense of them.

It would clear the air, then, if Mr Cameron immediately rephrased what sounds more like a prediction than a promise into the form ‘whatever that new settlement may be, and especially if the EU offers no new settlement at all’. Only then will we be able to believe that it could actually happen. Otherwise, like Croesus, we will have only ourselves to blame.

And if we vote no, we will, in the time-honoured tradition, carry on voting until we vote yes. No? Mr Cameron?

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9174511/is-david-cameron-trying-to-imitate-the-delphic-oracle/feed/0Epicurus on particle physicshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9169021/ancient-and-modern-scientists-are-catching-up-with-their-ancient-forebears/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9169021/ancient-and-modern-scientists-are-catching-up-with-their-ancient-forebears/#commentsThu, 27 Mar 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9169021According to a top TV scientist, in the beginning there was ‘empty space’ and ‘energy’. After a big bang, the universe started out as a ‘featureless void’. But emerging particles… Read more

]]>According to a top TV scientist, in the beginning there was ‘empty space’ and ‘energy’. After a big bang, the universe started out as a ‘featureless void’. But emerging particles ‘organised themselves into the universe we see today’ by ‘clumping together’ because of ‘deviation’ from perfect smoothness in ‘warped’ space. Meanwhile, cosmic light particles are zooming along in straight lines and still going strong, creating billions of other universes. This ‘astonishing idea’ is the ‘cornerstone of modern cosmology’. Ancient, too.

According to the farmer-poet Hesiod (7th century bc), in the beginning there was Khaos (‘empty space’) and the world was ‘featureless void’, till the ‘energy’ was supplied by Eros, ‘Lust’, to populate it with mountains, seas, etc. Epicurus (4th century bc) was worried about this: ‘when he was still young, he asked the schoolmaster what the Khaos came from if it came first. The master replied that he did not know: that was a job for philosophers. “Right,” said Epicurus, “I’ll have a few words with them if they know the truth about things that exist.”’

In fact he came across the works of the 5th century bc atomist, Democritus. From these he discovered that the universe was material, created out of atoms (= particles) falling through space. To form matter, these particles must have ‘clumped together’ to make this world because, Epicurus hypothesised, of a ‘deviation’ that ensured these atoms crashed into each other from time to time.

Further, space must be infinite — otherwise all the particles would pile up in a corner somewhere and slowly fill the universe up. In that case, it follows that, space being infinite, the particles are zooming along, swerving into each other elsewhere in the universe, forming worlds elsewhere; and since our world was born to live and die, so these other worlds must be undergoing exactly the same process, coming into being, living, dying (and dead). The universe is therefore filled with worlds in every stage of transition. Particles being infinite, the worlds must be infinite. QED.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9169021/ancient-and-modern-scientists-are-catching-up-with-their-ancient-forebears/feed/0Good teachershttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9162521/on-teaching-theory-st-jerome-is-with-daisy-christodoulou/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9162521/on-teaching-theory-st-jerome-is-with-daisy-christodoulou/#commentsThu, 20 Mar 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9162521Last week in The Spectator, Daisy Christodoulou argued that, contrary to current educational theory, children learned best via direct instruction and drills under the guidance of a good teacher, which… Read more

]]>Last week in The Spectator, Daisy Christodoulou argued that, contrary to current educational theory, children learned best via direct instruction and drills under the guidance of a good teacher, which might be hard work but was satisfying and good for pupil self-esteem. Romans would have seconded that.

In ad 403 St Jerome wrote a letter to Laeta, telling her how to teach her daughter Paula to read and write: make ivory or wooden letters; teach Paula a song to learn them and their sounds and their correct order, but also mix them up and encourage Paula to recognise them without such artificial aid; guide her first writing by hand, or outline letters for her to follow; and so on.

Quintilian, the 1st century ad Roman professor of education, emphasised the importance of the relationship between teacher and taught: ‘The teacher must have no vices himself nor tolerate them in others. He must not be strict and humourless, or free-and-easy and over-familiar: the one breeds hatred, the other contempt.

‘His conversation must concentrate on what is good and honourable; the more sound advice he gives, the less he will need to punish… He must happily answer questions, and question those who remain silent. In praising his pupils’ work, he must be neither grudging nor effusive: the one will put them off, the other encourage complacency. In correcting where necessary, he must not be sarcastic, let alone abusive; for the teacher who criticises his pupils as if he hates them puts many off the commitment to study …pupils who are taught properly love and respect their teacher: it is impossible to say how much more willingly we copy those whom we like.’

Romans made no bones of the fact that education required ‘tenacious memory’ and ‘toil’, as the grammarian Diomedes remarked, and ‘sweat and effort’ (St Jerome), to such an extent that it was likened to the training and discipline that an athlete underwent. For them, such an education was proof that one possessed the self-discipline, willingness to work hard and other ethical qualities that made one fit to — govern. Oh dear — not what modern educational theory is all about.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9162521/on-teaching-theory-st-jerome-is-with-daisy-christodoulou/feed/0Cicero on Putinhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9157831/cicero-would-have-agreed-with-putin/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9157831/cicero-would-have-agreed-with-putin/#commentsThu, 13 Mar 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9157831Last September Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against a ‘unipolar’ world, saying that the national revival of Russia was in line with its foreign policy objective of a multi-polar world… Read more

]]>Last September Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against a ‘unipolar’ world, saying that the national revival of Russia was in line with its foreign policy objective of a multi-polar world and the prevailing of international law over the rule of brute force. How very Roman of him. Cicero pointed out that if one wanted violence to end, the law must prevail; if it did not, violence would reign supreme. To no avail.

Every five years, the Roman censors asked the gods ‘to improve and strengthen the position of the Roman people’. There was nothing unique about this. Many states prayed for a similar outcome for themselves, while the historian Polybius commented that it was a mark of the greatness of a state’s constitution and culture to extend its power internationally. All this was simply a response to the nature of the ancient world. Inter-state conflict was endemic: Rome was just better at it, to the fury of its enemies.

The consequence was that treaties and obligations regularly went out of the window. After defeating Carthage in the first Punic War over the control of Sicily (241 BC), Rome promptly grabbed Sardinia and Corsica as well. Strategically, it was an intelligent move, but even the pro-Roman Polybius said it was unjust. When in 217 BC Egyptian Ptolemy and the Greek king Antiochus were arguing over Syria, Polybius wrote of the endless repetition of similar claims and arguments, ‘but there was no mediator to prevent or restrain injustice’, so both sides gave up and went to war. Anarchy, then, was a standard feature of the relationships between ancient states. Where diplomacy did occur, it was usually the diplomacy of coercion, and no one was bluffing.

Today’s world is largely the same. When push comes to shove, international law goes by the board. So the big question is: what does the Russian seizure of Crimea signify? As in the ancient world, it is all about status and prestige: a desperate attempt by Putin to prove that Russia is America’s equal in a multi-polar world. Or at least, its equal in allowing brute force to reign supreme.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9157831/cicero-would-have-agreed-with-putin/feed/23Harriet Harman vs Socrateshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9152281/harriet-harman-vs-socrates/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9152281/harriet-harman-vs-socrates/#commentsThu, 06 Mar 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9152281Since apologising has recently been all the rage, refusing to apologise, as Harriet Harman has done over the NCCL’s connection with the Paedophile Information Exchange, comes as a very pleasant… Read more

]]>Since apologising has recently been all the rage, refusing to apologise, as Harriet Harman has done over the NCCL’s connection with the Paedophile Information Exchange, comes as a very pleasant surprise. Ancient Greeks would have understood exactly what she was doing.

Socrates’ Apology (written by Plato) had nothing to do with apologising. Quite the opposite, in fact: apologia in ancient Greek meant ‘defence speech’, and Socrates’ apologia was Plato’s account — there were many others — of Socrates’ defence of his life and conduct against the charge of corrupting the young and introducing strange new gods. When he was found guilty and, as was the custom in cases where there was no fixed penalty, the prosecution and defence both made suggestions for punishment, Socrates proposed free meals for life at state expense, on the grounds of the benefits he had brought the city. The jurors voted for the prosecution’s proposal of the death penalty.

Mutating the mutanda, that is precisely what Miss Harman has done: defended herself by giving an account of her dealings, or rather lack of them, with PIE. So in Greek terms she has indeed ‘apologised’, though it is not all clear that her apologia has met with approval. And here we get to the point.

Socrates did not feel sorry for his actions, which Greeks expressed with unemotional phrases like ‘change my mind’, ‘repent’, ‘invite understanding’. But saying sorry has humiliating public overtones, suggesting behaviour in which you ought not to have indulged, admitting that you had compromised your honour, your public standing. That was shameful — anathema to Greeks. But Socrates felt that his standing in other people’s eyes had not been impugned by the verdict: he had done what was right. Nothing to say ‘sorry’ about.

Like ancient Greeks, no modern politician can endure humiliation. They have their ‘honour’ to uphold. Clearly Harman feels she did what was right with PIE. One speculates what honour Harman imagines she is upholding.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9152281/harriet-harman-vs-socrates/feed/0Yanukovych vs Caligulahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9145851/yanukovych-vs-caligula/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/ancient-and-modern/9145851/yanukovych-vs-caligula/#commentsThu, 27 Feb 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9145851Tyrants never learn, do they? From Caligula through Gadaffi to the ex-Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, they rule not to serve the people but themselves — and all in virtually identical… Read more

]]>Tyrants never learn, do they? From Caligula through Gadaffi to the ex-Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, they rule not to serve the people but themselves — and all in virtually identical ways.

The emperor Tiberius populated Capri with palaces and grottos where lovers entwined themselves for the pleasure of his guests, like Yanukovych’s gardens dotted with love-seats and colonnades. Caligula had built a vast barge in the form of a floating palace on a lake, complete with marble, mosaics, and a hot and cold bath system; Yanukovych had a floating restaurant designed as a galleon.

When Rome burned down in ad 64, Nero collared the grounds in the centre to construct a huge ‘Golden House’, covered in gold leaf, precious stones, ivory veneers and frescoes, complete with parklands, statues, fountains, lakes and animals. Yanukovych’s vast marble-lined mansion, hung with gold icons, inhabited a huge country estate with a private golf course and a zoo, and manicured lawns studded with statues of rabbits and deer. The only absent feature seems to be the sexual excesses that tyrants have regularly indulged.

Cicero tells us of the tyrant Dionysius, who virtually enslaved the city of Syracuse. The result? He could trust nobody. Fearing that his barber would cut his throat, he ordered his daughters to cut his beard and hair, but then, reckoning that was too dangerous, told them to trim it by singeing it with red-hot walnut shells instead. His bedroom was surrounded by a moat and drawbridge which he pulled up behind him before he went to sleep. Cicero commented, ‘Dionysius could not retrace his steps back to the paths of justice, since with the blindness of youth he had become entangled in such wrong and guilty of so many crimes as to make it impossible for him ever to be safe.’

And they all meet an identical end. As the Greek philosopher Thales commented, he could imagine nothing more novel than a tyrant who had grown old.